The forms of protest found their way ultimately into the halls of the First American Congress which convened in Philadelphia in 1774. The recent legislation was enumerated among the wrongs done the colonies by the mother country. Feeling became so bitter that an address was issued by the Congress on the fifth of September, 1774, "to the people of Great Britain" saying: "We think the Legislature of Great Britain is not authorized by the Constitution to establish a religion, fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets, or to erect an arbitrary form of government in any quarter of the globe." "By another act the Dominion of Canada is to be extended, modeled and governed, as that being disunited from us, detached from our interests by civil as well as religious prejudices, that by their numbers daily swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to administration so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion be fit instruments in the hands of power to reduce the ancient free Protestant colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves." Little did they think that the breach they were attempting to heal was widened by their procedure. The author of the address was John Jay, a lawyer from New York, with whom Papaphobia was a mania.
Nor did the failure of this method of diplomacy become apparent until several years later. The measure of appreciation and the expression of sentiment of the Canadian people in regard to this ill-timed and unchristian address, conceived in a fit of passion and by no means representative of the sentiments of the saner portion of the population, took expression at a more critical time. When, in 1776, the members of the same Congress, viewing with alarm the magnitude of the struggle upon which they had entered and to whose success they had pledged their honor, their fortunes and their lives, sought to enlist the resources of their neighbors in Canada, they met with a sudden and calamitous disappointment. To effect an alliance with the border brethren, three commissioners were appointed--Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Father John Carroll, a Jesuit priest, was invited by the Congress to accompany the party.